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Playstation 2 Pix and Rollout

Posted by Hemos on from the even-better-tekken dept.

Lekkim writes "Gaming Age Online has posted the first official picture of the upcoming next-gen playstation2 (its the official name...Apparently it has DVD capabilities and it looks pretty cool. Details are here. " Thanks to Mattrad for the European playstation links as well. It will ship in Japan on March 4, 2000 with an estimated cost of 370$US.

1 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. PSX2 destroys PC hardware + real URL by rcromwell2 · · Score: 4


    The real Sony URL is http://www.scei.co.jp/ps2 where you will find the real specs and screenshots.


    The PSX2's CPU has *14* separate FPU units vs 3 on the Athlon. It has two vector units capable of doing dot products, cross products, etc. It has a x9 multiply-and-accumulate unit which can do super-fast matrix operations. In short, for 3d calculations, it blows the PentiumIII/Athlon, and even the Alpha away.

    It's normal ram is RDRAM for a 3.6gb/sec bandwidth.

    It's rasterizer has a 2,560 bit bus! (embedded dram) with a RAM bandwidth of 48 GIGABYTEs/sec which is 48 times more than AGP 2x. It can render a whopping 2.4 gigapixels/sec using 16 pixel pipelines which is about 5 times the best PC 3d accelerator.

    Besides hardware transform and lighting, it's flexible enough to render 60+ million polys/sec and even 16 million+ BEZIER curved patches a sec.
    That's about 20 times the bet polygon throughput on a PentiumIII with SSE, and for Bezier patches it's probably 50 times faster.

    It's I/O and sound processors alone best the best PC I/O and sound controllers. (It's I/O processor alone is good enough to run Playstation 1 games)

    And, it decodes and displays DVD Video.

    In short, $360 is fucking cheap for this box! This box destroys E-Machine PCs 100 times over.

    And they have another box called TOOL which lets you develop and run PSX2 games on Linux with the PSX2 hardware!


    Just another comment. When the Playstation 1 first came out, it cost $299 with NO packin game. After buying a game and a second controller, with tax, it cost near $400.

    Folks, this is technology you should be excited about. You should dream of having a Linux box with the PSX2 hardware as your CPU/graphics card/CPU and DVD player!